Aaron Dahmen: Covid Christmas is difficult when families are separated

We are winning the fight against the virus, but as Aaron Dahmen writes, there is an insulating curse on our Covid freedom.

OPINION:

On Christmas day nine years ago, I put on shorts and a shirt, feasted on good food, and enthusiastically opened presents. The bright lights illuminated the tree, and there were the obligatory but embarrassing hugs and kisses from the family members.

For many kiwi families, it will be no different in 2020.

But nine years ago, I celebrated Christmas with my dad for the last time. We knew it was coming. He had been ill with motor neuron disease for approximately 12 months; our feast was soup because he couldn’t swallow well, and they brought him his gifts because he was in a wheelchair.

None of that facilitated his passing four days later. I was 13 years old.

Since then, the summer holidays have been one of reflection, mourning and pain. Not openly, of course. Usually I put a smile on my face and hide any feelings, so that I can be “happy” like everyone else. So I too can feel like celebrating.

Mom lived those experiences with me. She gets it. When I spend Christmas with her, we can commemorate and cry, all at the same time. Years later, he returned to Germany, his country of birth. It was no longer possible to build the life she wanted for us in Aotearoa. She didn’t want us to just get by.

I’ve seen her three times since she left, often for a month or two at a time, and often at Christmas. Our time together is rare, but highly valued.

Which brings me to the Covid-19 pandemic and indeed to our country’s battle against the virus.

There is no doubt that we are facing a winner. We have a managed isolation system that is clinically efficient. Our ability to track contracts has been greatly increased. By early next year, even a vaccine could be on our shores.

We are getting over this thing. But there is a cost.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern spoke about the sacrifices we have all made and continue to make. She is correct. They are real and painful.

Many of us have stories with loose threads, and this pandemic has been picking them up, little by little until our hearts are raw.

There was a time when Covid had not yet taken over the world and plans for me to visit Mom were still underway. As the year progressed, that journey took a back seat and my hope laboriously faded.

I held onto hope for a long time.

It wasn’t until one day in July that I packed my things at work, went home, and cried. The government had just announced plans to start charging for controlled isolation. That was the last nail in the coffin.

I’m not saying we should or shouldn’t charge. I understand why there is concern about taxpayers footing the bill for those who escape for the fancy vacations and then return to our shores.

But for me and others who don’t have buckets of gold lying around, he ruled out the option to travel and drew a divide between the haves and the have-nots.

Charging thousands of dollars to quarantine Kiwis returning from overseas seasons, regardless of the value of the trip (like a relative’s tangi on the high seas or for the precious moments before their death), you can’t help but feel like a pinch of cruelty in our country. land of goodness.

For a nation of five million people, with another million or so of our Whānau kiwis living abroad, my heart is heavy.

Many of us have spent Christmas losing those who packed up and migrated through the ditch or further. As it stands, that empty chair at the end of our table may not fill up for years.

It’s one thing to isolate yourself from the virus, but to isolate yourself from our sisters, brothers, sons, daughters, and yes, mothers, living abroad? Indefinitely? A home where people cannot be invited makes our country feel like a golden cage, one that we cannot leave and they cannot enter.

Our Covid-19 response has been refined into an art form. Over and over, we’ve heard the message from health officials: the system is working.

But we have to remember that we are also human. We are not a system. Humans are irrational. Humans are emotional. Humans survive because of the connection.

When Mom and I talk on the phone, it takes hours before the world catches up with us. We laugh. We cry. Then we both sigh, knowing that we must say goodbye, but not knowing when we will see each other again. That heavy feeling returns to my heart.

The land of goodness has never felt so far away.

Aaron Dahmen is a political reporter for Newstalk ZB.